


He Who Walks in Starlight

by beastlybrooke



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: M/M, because I cannot help myself, happy birthday aaravos here's your character study, with an added bonus of viravos baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:15:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27571393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beastlybrooke/pseuds/beastlybrooke
Summary: Aaravos doesn’t think of his birthday so much as a date rather than an arrangement of stars. Every year they align over him, the same as when he was born, and he feels their cold, distant caress.(In which Aaravos is born of a binary star that has not yet created his mate.)
Relationships: Aaravos/Viren (The Dragon Prince), Aaravos/Ziard (The Dragon Prince)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	He Who Walks in Starlight

**Author's Note:**

> I had to write something for Aaravos's birthday, it's what he deserves

He can’t quite remember the sensation of being born. There is only a cool darkness in his memory, that burns through him every time he searches for it. 

What he can remember is the pattern of the stars that day. The way they danced, tiny pinpricks of light against a pitch black sky. The images they created in his mind, connecting and disconnecting over and over, each time forming a different likeness, a different constellation. 

His favorite would always be the Lovers. Holding each other tight by the starlight. Never truly able to touch, to grasp each other in their warmth. They were only stars after all. Cold and distant and so far, far away. Their attachments to each other only an illusion created by him, by his vision at the time, at this particular angle of the universe. 

He remembers the Lovers decorating the sky on that first, magnificent night, when there was a whole world of possibilities at his fingertips. Once upon a time, he had thought perhaps he could achieve what they could not: to hold someone, to touch them truly, in their soul, and never let go. 

But a millenia passed in a blink, and he swiftly lost any chance he had at such devotion. 

Sure, there were some that caught his attention. Flickering meteors that lit up his night sky. But they were only ever meteors, not stars. And he could never catch them, never hold them in his grasp, never keep them for longer than a decade at most. 

He remembered Ziard most of all. Perhaps the brightest of his shooting stars. A brilliant light, a brilliant student. Ziard had such potential, had been worthy of such great things, Aaravos had no choice but to provide. He spent long days and long nights crafting a weapon deserving enough of Ziard as its wielder. And when it was finally finished, a great staff of dragon bone, fitted with amethyst, with a freedom to it so Ziard could craft it into his own, Aaravos bestowed his own magic. 

Ziard accepted it on his birthday, with a grin worthy of the gods and declared that he would never forsake Aaravos. He would be loyal to the Archmage until his death. 

And so he was. 

Mortal life is so fleeting, of this Aaravos was aware. But never had he thought to lose his first student, his dark mage, his lover so soon. 

It was a gruesome, painful heartbreak that soon shifted and reformed into something new, something Aaravos had never truly felt before: hatred. Hatred for Sol Regem, hatred for the dragons, hatred even for his own kin that turned on the humans and called them cruel for the magic he’d created. 

And so Aaravos left all thought of the Lovers, of humans and birthdays and apples, behind him. He had a new constellation to aspire to. The Destroyer. 

The destruction he wrought in his heartbreak was like nothing Xadia had ever seen before. She, like Aaravos’ heart, would be torn in two, never to be reunited. 

The elves suffered. The humans suffered. The dragons suffered, and Aaravos delighted in all of it. Every being alive would feel a fraction of what he felt on that day, as Ziard was engulfed in flames. 

The very stars themselves would suffer his loss. 

He fell from them, far before he was resigned to that awful place. 

(Unlike the other humans and elves without connection to the stars, Aaravos does not think of his birthday so much as a date rather than an arrangement of stars. Every year they align over him, the same as when he was born, and he feels their cold, distant caress.)

Until the day came that he didn’t. 

What caused it was unclear. Too many half-truths. Too many creatures dead at his feet. Too much magic taken from others instead of the starlight. Whatever it was, it felt to him like having his very identity stolen away from him. Everything that made him himself slowly withered away and died, creating a being less balanced by the star’s warmth and beauty, what survived only calculating and cruel. The light inside him faded first, then the beacon on his chest, dulling into darkness. The unique mark, the bearer of his soul, the reminder of the star he had been born from, diminished into just another reminder of that which he had lost. 

He quickly deteriorated from an elegant, efficient destroyer of worlds into a crude, incompetent commander. His magic turned sloppy. Inevitably, Avizandum discovered his betrayal. 

How strongly he wished for death when that day came. Death could only be a release from this great pain. Surely it was the only punishment suited to his crimes. 

But Avizandum and Zubeia were craftier than they seemed, and Aaravos’s banishment into that unknown realm was quick and unforeseeable. 

The furnishings were grand, the illusion of freedom great with the realm’s countless rooms and books, a window through the mirror the seemingly only reminder that Aaravos was no longer a part of the real world. Except an all-consuming absence quickly made itself known to him, upon his exploration of it. There were no stars. 

Even a fallen startouch elf could not survive such a void. 

Hundreds of years passed, but these did not feel the same as the other centuries. Where the previous millenia had been all too short, these days passed long and lingered in the void of his magic, his identity. Candles melted slower and slower with every year. 

Aaravos didn’t feel a birthday for centuries, only a dull ache where once stars had caressed him. However cold and distant he’d considered them, the omission of their touch suffocated his every sense. Without his magic, without his constellations, without his world, he was nothing. 

The view through the mirror did not change, no matter how long he looked. 

(Every year, during a particular night, Avizandum and Zubeia feel a crushing despair in the air, as though the sky is calling out for her lost son, searching and searching for someone she can never quite find.) 

And then one day, the whole realm seemed to shift. 

Aaravos stumbled, ungracefully to the mirror, too anxious to be hopeful, afraid of what he might find in her reflection. Upon entering the study, he nearly dropped to his knees. 

For reflected on the other side of the mirror was the Xadian night sky. Even through the mirror’s magic, the stars whispered to him, calling him home. 

He wept at their call, unable to answer, only capable of staring through the glass and watching as the stars swept across the sky, clinging to the stalwart frame.

A year later, he was almost the elegant, efficient elf that had led the world into ruin. 

He prepared all sorts of dark magic spells, researched every human history, gleefully watched through the mirror as a new dark mage attempted to discover his secrets. 

And if the mage reminded him of Ziard, of his longing to touch and be touched, of his desire to outdo the great Lovers in the sky, he dutifully did not admit it to himself, did not allow himself to think of the Lovers, nor of hope. The mage was only a tool through which he could escape this starless place and get back to destroying a whole new generation of Xadia. He was only a tool, full of the same grief and rage that Aaravos was. Easy to fool. Easier to manipulate. 

Then he heard his voice for the first time, and a bit of his resolve shattered. 

And beyond this mage’s voice, the blood pact that transported his familiar reintroduced a feeling to Aaravos that he had long forgotten. A feeling he cast away, regarded as something pathetically human, too warm to belong to a creature of the cold starlight. A feeling that was altogether too close to what he imagined the Lovers might share, if they were ever allowed to truly meet. 

(A voice at the back of his mind gently guides him, as he follows the mage to the crown, to the Sunforge, to the Storm Spire, that speaks of wishes and hopes and worst fears. A voice that reminds him the starlight is only cold from a distance. It can burn so desperately hot up close.) 

Freedom was more important, Aaravos argued to himself. It must come at any cost. 

And it did. 

Aaravos could not bear to watch him fall. 

In the days after, as his familiar advised the daughter’s next steps, Aaravos once again curled in on himself, trapped in a cocoon that would bring him the freedom he so desired. 

What worth was freedom when it came without hope? What help was influence when it rose without passion? What use was power when it was granted without love?

Aaravos considered the many possibilities of his new life in the many months it took to emerge from the realm of the mirror. So many stars would once again be in his influence. So many constellations would offer their treasures. So many universes would depend on the path he decided to tread.

When he is finally born again, it is under the same pattern of stars. 

He tears himself apart as he returns to the world, every star on his skin aglow as he reconnects with his birth arcanum. Even his mark, though it does not yet regain its former glory, glows around the edges with a little more light. 

The sky above breathes out a great sigh of relief for her son, now found again.

But greater perhaps than the feeling of the stars’ gentle caress is the look the dirty, lost dark mage gives him as he emerges. 

Viren’s eyes blaze brighter than the stars ever have. 

Aaravos knows everything in that moment. Viren is no meteor, no fleeting mark on the surface of the sky. This human before him has the heart of something much more permanent. 

Every choice Aaravos had considered suddenly falls away, discarded in the light of this blinding hope. The Destroyer offers her cruel delight, but Aaravos turns away. There is only one constellation that has always decorated his sky. One constellation that contains his star, as well as the light of another, yet unclaimed. 

He imagines his starmate will be born soon. On this day even. 

They fall on each other immediately. A stellar collision to rival any magic in Xadia. 

So long has Aaravos wished to feel warmth, to feel the touch of another, to overcome what his constellation could not. And as they kiss in that quiet cave, out of sight of the night sky, Aaravos lets himself caress every bit of Viren’s skin he can touch. 

He is, after all, the first star to touch another. 

It feels a bit like burning, like being born, like his skin is so alive with starlight he can barely tell where his light ends and Viren’s begins. 

The touches are almost too much, too overwhelming for Aaravos to notice the little bits of him that are bleeding out into Viren, the little bits of Viren that are bleeding into him.

They finally split apart at the lips, eyes meeting each other in a dazzling display that says I love you I love you I love you. As if soulmates could have anything else to say. 

Aaravos’s chest tingles, and he collapses forward, gripping tighter and tighter to Viren’s skin, burying his face into Viren’s neck to stifle his shout. Viren seems to respond in kind, his skin hot and glowing, brimming with a newfound energy, a new arcanum, and Aaravos knows that his starmate is born. 

When he pulls himself out of Viren’s neck, he gasps at the light bursting from his chest. His mark is bright and brilliant for the first time in centuries. 

Viren’s chest is embroidered with the same warm light, beaming out and mixing with Aaravos’s. Identical marks. Stars so close to each other in the sky, they almost seem to touch. 

Aaravos can’t help the excited giggle he lets out at the sight. After all, he’s been waiting for a millenia. 

“It seems that we are both reborn today,” he mutters into Viren’s lips, before kissing him again, tasting the first fires of his eternal love. 

“Happy birthday, my star.”


End file.
